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Fiançailles pour rire, FP101

Introduction

This is Poulenc’s most famous cycle for the female voice. Having set three of Vilmorin’s poems at the end of 1937 he now returned to her work with renewed delight, all too aware that his beloved ‘Loulou’ had moved to Hungary to live with her husband Count Pálffy in his castle. The composer missed her, and during the war years he spoke of her as a prisoner on her husband’s estates (a true Parisian—like Poulenc—regarded any exile from Paris as something unimaginably tiresome). It was the composer’s initial idea to write a cycle of male songs for Bernac, but the choice of texts proved difficult (there were other composers like Georges Auric who were equally keen to set Vilmorin’s words). Instead he was drawn into the idea of making a short and concise cycle in the manner of Schumann’s Elisabeth Kulmann songs Op 104. To imitate Schumann he had originally planned a seven-song set, but six songs proved sufficient in the end.

Recordings

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This is an elegant sisterly meditation on the suitability of André de Vilmorin’s girlfriend. Louise muses as to whether the new lover will make her brother happy. Of course Poulenc also knew André well. The musical shape and mood depict concern at one remove, without passion but with affectionate concern. ‘The tonal ambiguity’, writes Poulenc in JdmM, referring to the final chord, ‘prevents the song from coming to a conclusion and so prepares the way for the following songs.’

I can say nothing more
nor do anything for him.
He died for his beautiful one
he died a beautiful death
outside
under the tree of the Law
in deep silence
in open countryside
in the grass.

He died unnoticed
crying out in his passing
calling, calling me
but as I was far from him
and because his voice no longer carried
he died alone in the woods
beneath the tree of his childhood
and I can say nothing more
nor do anything for him.

Here is an altogether deeper song without rivalling the Éluard settings in a similar vein. It is not known whose death is referred to in the poem but, as in the first song, the feminine tone is conserved by a certain musical reserve. The song must be sung ‘with great intensity’ (JdmM) that avoids outright passion.

I can say nothing more
nor do anything for him.
He died for his beautiful one
he died a beautiful death
outside
under the tree of the Law
in deep silence
in open countryside
in the grass.
He died unnoticed
crying out in his passing
calling
calling me.
But as I was far from him
and because his voice no longer carried
he died alone in the woods
beneath the tree of his childhood.
And I can say nothing more
nor do anything for him.

With its famously tricky accompaniment, this song revisits the rueful sexual philosophy of Le garçon de Liège, a kind of rationalized dissatisfaction, a gracious and graceful acceptance of the realities of life, including unfaithfulness in love. This is a Parisian cynicism that poet and composer have in common. For Vilmorin love is something that flies past her; she speaks of inconstancy and betrayal, even of weeping, but this is all part of the charivari of life and the undependability of human emotion. Accordingly there is no complaint or bitterness in the music, only a kind of joie de vivre (in this case simply the joy of being alive enough to experience and to suffer). The song’s subtext and undertone, a worldly sigh of disappointment, is scarcely to be discerned amidst the ebullience of the piano’s rushing semiquavers and cascading chords; the modulated twists and turns of the vocal line reveal greater vulnerability. The poem plays on the double meaning of ‘voleur’ (thief and flier); it ends with Vilmorin’s wish that her thief would steal her. But if this does not happen, c’est la vie must be her response. It would be inestimably vulgar for the poet, already in her thirties, to wail her discontent to the heavens. So instead, with Poulenc’s help, she smiles ruefully and shrugs her shoulders as only the French can. How differently would this abandonment be expressed in a German lied.

This song was dedicated to the soprano Ninon Vallin, the greatest female recitalist of her generation; no doubt Poulenc hoped she would be tempted to perform a song as sumptuous as this, for it is the heavyweight number of the set in terms of its depth of emotion and sovereign legato line. According to Hugues Cuenod, Vallin (who in any case favoured Louis Beydts as a composer over Poulenc) was horrified with the opening line of the poem and refused to sing it. Richard D E Burton has pointed out that the death by decapitation of Poulenc’s fellow-composer Pierre-Octave Ferroud in 1936 had a profound effect on him; after that event he seems to have been drawn to the imagery of the broken corpse, in the manner of a Pietà, although Burton fails to take the dark Ronsard setting from 1925, Je n’ai plus que les os, into account. The Vilmorin text when read on its own seems scarcely to call for music as lyrical as this, but this was always Poulenc’s trick: he found music for texts that somehow humanized them and made them more accessible, and the obscurity of the texts themselves saved his music from seeming sentimental and over-flowery. This was a masterful exchange and a lesson in the checks and balances of successful song-writing. Ninon Vallin, who had been a Fauré protégée, clearly did not know what she was missing. Her disinclination to trust his modernity is a lesson to every famous singer who has failed to engage with younger living composers. As it was she remained satisfied with her duo with Reynaldo Hahn.

Enamoured couple with the misprized accents
the violin and its player please me.
Ah! I love these wailings long drawn out
on the cord of uneasiness.
In chords on the cords of the hanged
at the hour when the Laws are silent
the heart, formed like a strawberry,
offers itself to love like an unknown fruit.

Violon is the song from the set that is most often heard on its own. It gives both singer and pianist the challenge of imitating the exaggerated legato of a restaurant violinist, here Hungarian in inspiration because it refers back in the composer’s mind to Vilmorin’s temporary homeland where she lived with her spouse, Count Pálffy. Poulenc insisted however (JdmM) that the song evoked Paris, and that the recipient of the serenade was wearing a hat by Caroline Reboux, the Chanel of milliners. The song suggests the slinky, smoky atmosphere of a nightclub, but this has tended to encourage many performers, less experienced in the composer’s style, to exaggerate the populist side of this music to the point of parody—which was never Poulenc’s intention. The stream-of-consciousness wordplay inspired by the curvaceous shape of the violin will be heard later on this disc in another Vilmorin setting, Paganini. Here the poet sees the player and his instrument entwined like a ‘couple amoureux’; Poulenc provides a song where, in matters of ensemble and musical complicity, the voice and piano are conjoined in similar manner. The passage where the violinist skates up the fingerboard (at ‘Le violin et son joueur’) and the quasi parlando at the end of the song (the voice murmuring ‘en forme de fraise’ in the background while the violin/piano plays an obbligato) are charmingly effective. Most of the accompaniment, effulgently pedalled, is first and foremost pianistic, but the final bars of the song conjure violin harmonics and pizzicato; Benjamin Britten’s violin evocation in a Thomas Hardy setting, At the Railway Station, Upway from his Winter Words cycle (composed fourteen years later), employs similar imitative devices.

Enamoured couple with the misprized accents
the violin and its player please me.
Ah! I love these wailings long drawn out
on the cord of uneasiness.
In chords on the cords of the hanged
at the hour when the Laws are silent
the heart, formed like a strawberry,
offers itself to love like an unknown fruit.

Promised flowers, flowers held in your arms,
flowers sprung from the parentheses of a step,
who brought you these flowers in winter
powdered with the sand of the seas?
Sand of your kisses, flowers of faded loves
the beautiful eyes are ashes and in the fireplace
a heart beribboned with sighs
burns with its treasured pictures.

Fleurs is one of the most static and most beautiful of all Poulenc’s songs. Once again it shows a certain passive resignation on the part of Vilmorin in matters of love and, through her, on the part of Poulenc himself. ‘Il faut la chanter humblement’, he writes in JdmM. The poet burns love letters from the past and muses on the melancholy of life where affection is turned to ashes. Mozart’s song about another Louise who burns her letters comes to mind: the Baumberg setting Als Luise die Briefe K520, a lied that bristles with fury and anguish, a short sharp shock. That Austrian Luise, choking back her emotion, confesses that she still burns with love, even if she destroys the letters. On the other hand, the rational Louise de Vilmorin and her alter-ego Francis Poulenc are superbly imperturbable in the slow lilting movement of crotchets in 3/4; they humbly accept that everything in life is transient. A mood of deep, even inconsolable regret is expressed without undue emphasis or exaggeration. It is music like this that wins the heart of those who feel more temperamentally drawn to the mélodie than to the German lied. The older Gabriel Fauré was a special master in slow songs of this kind where implacable crotchets accompany a vocal line that remains relatively undemonstrative, but which nevertheless breaks the heart for all that it does not permit itself to say. Perhaps Poulenc, as Bernac’s accompanist in a wide range of French song, had learned something from Fauré, a composer he had earlier professed not to admire.

Promised flowers, flowers held in your arms,
flowers sprung from the parenthesis of a step,
who brought you these flowers in winter
powdered with the sand of the seas?
Sand of your kisses, flowers of faded loves
the beautiful eyes are ashes and in the fireplace
a heart beribboned with sighs
burns with its treasured pictures.